Lima: Abel & Ware reunite to win gold on 3m synchro

Jennifer Abel and Pamela Ware came together for the first time in three years and captured the gold medal in the women’s 3m synchronized springboard to begin the diving competition at the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru on Thursday.

Abel, from Laval, Que., and Montreal’s Ware scored 309.60 points in the final to finish comfortably ahead of Brooke Schultz and Sarah Bacon of the United States of America, who mustered 290.10 points.

Mexico’s Paola Espinosa Sanchez and Dolores Hernandez Monzon, the defending champions from four years ago in Toronto, placed third with 285.00 points.

“Today I was really excited, it was a blast from the past, we hadn’t competed together in three years” said Ware, 26, “At Toronto 2015 we were actually a team and we came second and today, we haven’t been a team for three years, and we came first, I think it just shows how much we’ve progressed individually.”

Ware and Abel were teammates in the 3m synchro leading up to and including Rio 2016. Since then, Abel, 27, has paired up with Saint-Constant, Que.’s Mélissa Citrini-Beaulieu who was not Abel’s partner in Lima because of quota limitations for each country at the Pan Am Games.

Abel and Citrini-Beaulieu, Canada’s regular women’s 3m synchro team, earned early nomination for next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo at the FINA World Championships last month.

Still, even if Thursday was a one-time thing, Abel said it was a welcome reunion, “We hadn’t practiced since Rio 2016 so we had no expectations, but at the same time we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves, so we put our dives together, we knew what we were capable of and we just did our best,” said the three-time Olympian.

“We dove four years together so we know how to manage ourselves but I think we were just doing our dives and following each other,” said Abel.

Canada does not have an entry in either the men’s or women’s 1m springboard, so the next Canadians to compete will be Beaconsfield, Que.’s Vincent Riendeau and Pointe-Claire, Que.’s Nathan Zsombor-Murray, in the men’s 10m synchro platform final on Friday.